 First question is, can I be heard all right? Is that any better? No, I'm sorry, I simply cannot handle technology. I'm a Scotsman, we're famous for our engineering, not me. If I were to try a PowerPoint presentation, I'm afraid it would be a farce. You'll remember the lecturer in the third man who ends up running away and being bitten by a parrot. No good. So if you can bear with my voice, here we go. I might start off by saying that I am a historian and it's been very interesting listening to people talking this morning about economics. It always strikes me that the sort of economics you get in the later 20th century is really based on the first half of the 20th century, that great slump. It's utterly anomalous, a product of the First World War and so on. Sooner we get back to 1890, the better. Now, I suppose it is the end of, it is the hardlock story of all lecturers, but I have a huge subject to cover and I'll do my best with it. The Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, with all the complications that follow there from. The Ottoman Empire, Morocco to the Volga at one stage. I don't want to talk about this. I can only indicate one or two main lines. Now, let me just sum up the period that I think we should maybe concentrate on. The First World War didn't really break out in 1914. It broke out in 1911. I don't know, those of you who maybe remember the origins of the First World War will maybe remember the Second Moroccan dispute when the Germans sent a gunboat to Agadir and a Franco-German quarrel resulted. Now, that resulted in the British taking the side of the French. In the gap, the Italians thought, oh, good, time for us to get our bit in the sun. So they invaded Libya, which was then an Ottoman possession, and then went on to occupy the Dodecanese islands, some of which are just down the road. That was Italy firing the starting gun. Now, the Turks didn't have a good time with that war. They didn't have a navy. Of course, it excited the Balkan states to start attacking the Ottoman Empire, so they took the Ottoman Balkans all except for the area around Edirne. Then the First World War comes up, and there's a dimension to that, which is really what the Germans and the Austrians said. The Ottoman Turkey is going to be our Egypt. The position that the British have in Egypt, or if you like, the French and Syria, the Germans would get in Hanatoli. The German presence, the Austrian presence, is all around. Acro really became capital because the Germans put a railway station in it. It comes that dimension of rival rail for the Middle East, already involving oil, brought Russia and Germany for the first time to the great clash. That's the background. Now, the war in the West formally ended in November 1918, but then it went on, and it went on with the Turkish nationalist war of independence, which was really only ended in the summer of 1923 by the Treaty of Lausanne. So when we talk the First World War, we're really talking 1911 to 1923, after which the world makes its failed effort to get back to what an American president called normalcy, wonderful word, President Harding. Now, what do we make of this? Of the attempt by the West to take over the Middle East? The Germans didn't manage it. The Russians had a goal. The British and French and the Italians stepped in, created mandates, created, if you like, a Jewish national home. And people like Lord Carlsman, the foreign secretary, who had been viceroy of India, when he was asked, what do you think about the British Empire, your lordship, replied, we shall be in India as if forever, thinking it's going to be a new Roman Empire. Now these people look very foolish indeed, not just by 1947 when they had to scuttle out of India, but even by 1930 it was obvious enough that Iraq hadn't worked. Lawrence of Arabia observed it all, and he said, why is it that we, with an army of 100,000 men, with poison gas and tanks, can't keep the peace in Iraq where the Turks did it, with a locally raised army of 14,000 men, executing 95 people a year? It's a good question, be it said then as now. Now looking back on it, the thing that I really don't understand is this. Why is it that these people of 1914, Gertrude Bell, Croson, Lloyd George, are very well educated, they're very clever, they wrote extremely well a lot of them, how could they be so wrong? What accounts for this amazing overconfidence with which they lead the West into this adventure in the Middle East? I suppose, although I don't want to harp too much on it, I suppose the same thing would have to be said about the Americans later on, going on to Iraq. I have to say that maybe I was mistaken, but I supported that. All my Turkish friends said you were quite wrong. This is not a good idea. The striking thing is the confidence with which they go in, and then suddenly run into a situation, which is to say the least complicated. As I say, I'm not going to condemn, because I'd have to condemn my own original misjudgment, which I would do. So we're dealing with a question, first of all, of overconfidence, and dealing with the Middle East. Now, I might as well tell you a little anecdote about this. In 1915, when the Turks appeared to be very weak, Winston Churchill said the moment has come to send battleships through the garden elves, and the Turks will just collapse. After all, they collapsed in the Balkan wars. They won't fight back. And they landed their army at Gallipoli. And only two people in the whole of the British army said this is a mistake. One was an interesting man, Obrie Herbert, who was the son of the Earl of Carnavon, who was one of these weird linguists. He picked up Persian, Turkish, God knows what. And he said, don't do this. He was the interpreter. He said, if you push the Turks against the wall, they'll fight back. And the other man was another interesting chap, a regimental colonel and Doughty Wiley, who had become what was called a military council in Adana. You know, as the Ottoman, well really the Armenian question, to be frank, as it got internationalised, international observers were placed there to see what was happening. They were called military councils. And Doughty Wiley was one, a colonel of a decent regiment. And he lived in Adana and saw what was going on. He could see the problems of the whole Armenian thing. And he ended up sympathising with the Turks. And when the Balkan wars broke out, he resigned his commission and served in the Turkish equivalent of the Red Cross. It's called the Red Crescent. And they gave him a big medal for it. Now, if we joined the army, did his patriotic stuff in Gallipoli. But when he was invited to go and land at the Dardanelles, he said, I'm not carrying a gun. I'm not going to kill any Turks. So he carried a swagger stick only. And I'm sorry to say he got shot, or all Doughty Wiley. They were the only two people in the British army who said, this is a mistake. Now, let me just introduce another little theme, which I think I owe it to myself to mention. You'll be aware of the name Edward Said. Now, before you read Orientalism, have a look at a devastating book by an uncle Robert Irwin, which is about the Said question. The word Orientalist has now become an insult. It means that people look at the Orientalist with western eyes and, as it were, adopt an insulting, patronising attitude to it. Now, that is an utter and total misuse of the word Orientalist. The Orientalists are people who, almost by definition, are love the subject. You cannot take on something as difficult as Arabic, or Ottoman Turkish, or I think old Persian. Without having always a love of the subject, you'd have to have it. And they don't spend their lives looking at places like this. If they automatically dislike it or want to patronise it, it's quite wrong. And the Said book is full of holes. He neglected the whole of German scholarship, and German scholarship on this subject is bigger than anywhere else. So I want to make my ritual protest against this misuse of the word Orientalist. Now, there are Orientalists, and the Orientalists in this Said sense are here. There are people who look at their own civilisation and say, why are we not the West? These are the Orientalists, not us. And this introduces quite an interesting subject about the background to the First World War and the aftermath. What made Turkey tick? Because we can know us that question. The Middle East, when it was Ottoman, somehow ticked as Lawrence noticed of Iraq. It didn't tick with the West at all. Now, what made the Ottomans tick? And it's a good enough question to begin with. In the days when Kersin was expressing himself with neocontent on the subject of glorification on the subject of the West, he would say, people would say, the Turks bring the old everything to Byzantium. There is a theory of Turkish history, associated with man called Gibbs, American. When he was stuck, written in 1916, which said that the Turks are the sort of people who can create an empire of the steppe for a couple of generations, then in collapses. If they want to make a real empire, they had to take the mobiles of Byzantium. So there is sort of Byzantium with attitude, if you like. This can really be weaved aside. We can forget about that. There are interesting similarities between the Turks and the elite Byzantines. Half the Byzantine aristocracy simply defected to the Turks because they had a steppe that worked. It's as simple as that. But you can't really argue that it's Byzantium in disguise. What you can maybe argue about Turkey is that the Islam of the creative days, by which I mean the 15th century when Constantinople was taken, is an Islam which is much more open. Wine is drunk at the court, for instance. The Orthodox Church became the biggest landowner in the whole of the empire. Mehmed Fatih, the conqueror, was after all himself three quarters bulk and Christian by origin. You could argue, I'm not going to be dramatic, that the Islam which created the Ottomans in the early days up to Suleiman in the 16th century is maybe much more flexible, more open. It's at least arguable. It's possible to argue, and here you're stamping on corns. Why did the Ottoman Empire decline? Again, there is, as it were, an Orientalist attitude which is associated with the Republic of the 1930s, the 1940s, when people would say the Ottoman Empire declined because of Islam. You take this sort of story. In 1583, I think, we're up the third, I'm not sure, but around then. There was an Ottoman astronomy. You did it for navigation, and they had a very good navy. And they had telescopes at the top of a tower at Beshingdash. The clerics didn't like this. The ulema didn't like this, partly because it's astrology. And they said, look, you are trying to probe the secrets of God. You mustn't do this. And then there was an earthquake. And the ulema said, that's God's punishment for your tribe looking at his secrets. So they stuffed the telescopes down over the tower, end of Ottoman astronomy. You might say, right, Islam, anti-progress. But then you might widen it to take in what generally happened in the Mediterranean at that time. If you take, for instance, the world of counter-reformation Spain, it's not entirely dissimilar. I came across a wonderful one, 1776, Adam Smith Publishers. America does its stuff. There was one faculty left of the University of Salamanca. All the donors were busy doing something else, so there was only one question to be answered in Latin, and it read, what language do the angels speak? That is the world of counter-reformation Catholicism in the later 18th century, and it's rather similar to what could be said to be going on with Islam in that period. Now, however you want to argue it, there is one strand which is worth picking up now, I think, when we're looking at present-day Turkish politics. For a long time in Turkey, you were supposed to see that the late Ottoman Empire was just so much historic and rubbish, and there was a great line in one of the bits of proofs, which I remember, which is that these people look on history as a chicken looks at the bits of eggshell from which it is. In the later 1920s, and you might have said, let's just get rid of all of this Ottoman junk, all these creepy corrupt lefntons, all these dead clerics with their silly questions and their unreadable script. Let's emancipate the women, let's follow the best foreign examples, John Dewey came from America to advise them on education, this kind of thing. Demineck de Valois arrived to tell them all about the ballet, and German architects all over the place through a heroic period, but they do not want to know about their history. And although Islam wasn't exactly suppressed, it wasn't given any sort of encouragement. You know, sometimes if you don't give religion what it wants, it claims to be persecuted. When it talks the language of the persecuted and the style of the persecutor, in effect, so you have to be careful about that. And there were limits to the persecution of Islam at the time, but they do not want to know about the Ottoman past, and they had thrown out almost all members of the Ottoman dynasty who were languishing abroad, a lot of them. They reformed a language in a way which some people would, and I'm sure Mr Varacur would say that the language reform was brutal and unnecessary, but it still divides the Turks. They've got a literate population. If you go into a bookshop, you will see quite a flourishing publishing industry, and it wouldn't be true of anywhere to the Eastern South, but this would be the case. At any rate, my point is that the Ataturk Revolution is something which abolished history. Now, it's that incidentally which accounts for the survival of all these statues around the place. I'm not terribly hostile to it because I can see why an educated girl would say that so many of them do. If that man hadn't lived, I wouldn't have been where I am now with an independent income and a job of my own. It's important. They obviously exaggerate the... there are too many statues of that sort. I don't know what they can do. Some of the quotations are in funny with... I don't know how many of you here are Turkish, but the best one I ever discovered was in a garage on the way to Cappadocia where a great man was statueing there, and it read, too sure for you, meaning the Turkish driver is a person of the most exquisite sensitivity. I don't... Obviously, we have to get away from this kind of hero worship. Now, what has been interesting about it is the way in which the Turkish Republic, despite everything, despite its military coups, despite this and that and the other, it's been a success story, and the little examples all over the place. Russians die at 60, Turks die at 70. I don't believe the statistics of... I don't believe any statistic in Turkey at all, actually, because they've got better things to do than to count their statistics. I often think that the Italians steal from the state and are dynamic, and in England the state steals from the people and it's stagnant. Now, this is a place with a huge black economy. It's going somewhere, little example. There are something like 2 million refugees here, and that is not true of any other country in Athens and Singapore. I won't go on about that. The point is too obvious, I think, to anybody who has seen it. Problems all over the place. Now, one strange consequence has been that the Atatürk Republic has been eroded its secular standards, which resulted in many, many very good things. Very good hospitals, not bad schools, all that sort of thing. The secular standards have ceased somewhere to be living. You have the phenomenon coming up of political Islam here. I don't want to talk too much about what goes on internally. What I'm interested in is what the consequences are going to be for the whole area, because Turkey has the dynamic bit of it, to be frank. The one where it makes things, and says for example, that Turkey is going to be sucked into the sort of role that it had in the 17th, 18th century, when it's got its tensions, it's got its funny relationship with Persia. I'm afraid to say, we have a Kurdish problem here. It's not an easy one. There are seven different Kurdish languages. Setting up a Kurdistan is not a simple matter. Maybe the answer to it is going to have to be that the Turks take over Northern Iraq. That's happened in the days of Selen Ligrim. It means problems for the Turks. Their relationship with Europe has become complicated. I don't know what on Earth can be done about that. On the economic side, it's very valuable. On the other side, the Turks are expanding into Russia. It exports to, even to Central Asia, are going up at something like 15% per annum. In other words, Turkey is in a very dangerous position at the moment when it might get the idea that it has the right to be a great power in the region. I think this sort of thing is dangerous. I found I have to say that business with Israel the other day just immensely dismaying. I don't know what the answer to the Gaza Strip would be, but I think to use it as a way of building up anti-Israeli sentiment, which is quite easy to do here. Not anti-Jewish, but anti-Israeli. It's quite easy to stir it up. Allowing that to happen, and then for the Israelis to handle the whole thing so incredibly badly, of course, compounds the whole problem. It looks to me as if when I came to Turkey in 1995, people said it was a strange eccentric thing to do. I came here for many reasons. The very first of which was when I arrived at the airport, I saw six policemen straight out of Midnight Express looking unbelievably grim, with great big black nostaches, smoking half of the under a sign mark, strictly no smoking. But I thought, oh, my sort of country. Now, the decision to come here in 1995 now looks a great deal less eccentric. I didn't know what I was letting myself in for, but it's been an extraordinary, really interesting time. Now where we go from here is, I think, going to be complicated. I'm afraid that the Ottoman Empire got torn apart looking at Persia one minute, looking at Vienna the next, having to deal with Morocco one minute and the Volgaire the next. Worried again what sort of Islam it has, what its attitudes could be to education of women, all this kind of thing, until at the end they say, oh please, West, can we copy you, which is quite the wrong thing because this country has got strength of its own. Now, I think I've probably gone for the initial themes of what I wanted to talk about. So, thank you.